Need for Speed: Most Wanted (commonly abbreviated to as NFS: MW) is an upcoming 2012 sandboxracingvideo game, developed by British games developer Criterion Games and published by Electronic Arts. Announced on 4 June 2012, during EA's E3 press conference, Most Wanted is the nineteenth title in the long-running Need for Speed series and will be released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PlayStation Vita as well as iOS, beginning in North America on 30 October 2012. The game will pick up on the Most WantedIP, as opposed to the Hot Pursuit reboot that Criterion developed previously

The next generation of Autolog lets you leave your mark across Fairhaven City, displaying record speeds, times, pursuits and jump distances. Cruise past any speed camera, Jack Spot or jump to view its unique leaderboard, and then take a run up, hit the gas and see if you can top it. Hit the biggest air off any billboard jump, and we’ll even display your face on the billboard in their game! – a constant reminder to your friends that you are Most Wanted.

Find it. Drive it.

Pick a Car. Make it Your Own. Earn the right to be Most Wanted.

For too long you’ve had to wait to drive the cars you love. Not anymore. In Most Wanted, “Open” means more than just open world. Practically every car’s available from the start. Explore the world. If you can find it, you can drive it. Each car has a series of events, designed to showcase its unique qualities. Master each car in your own time, in any order to earn Speed Points and rank up. Score enough and you’ll earn the right to take on 10 of the hottest cars in the game - the Most Wanted Racers. Beat them all one-on-one to become Fairhaven’s Most Wanted. Swing the odds in your favor by modifying your car with such pursuit-busting delights as: Reinforced Chassis, Reinflating Tires, Impact Protection, Powershot Nitrous or Track Tires. Customization in Most Wanted is about gameplay. Every mod changes what you can do with the car. Get the drop on your friends, your rivals and The Law by experimenting with different cars and combinations.

Buckle up, hit the gas and hold on tight; you’re in for the ride of your life. In Most Wanted, you’ll experience dream cars, the way you always wanted them. No tracks and no simulation. It’s about taking your ride to the limit and beyond, nailing perfect 200 mile-an-hour drifts, slamming your friends off the road, outsmarting the cops and getting away with it in style.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a social game. But not as you know it. Forget Farmville or any of those other game that annoyingly spam your Facebook inbox. This is something different. Social integration underpins every aspect of Most Wanted. Along every stretch of road is a challenge that’s been high scored by a friend, a speed camera that’s been flashed at a more reckless speed or a billboard that’s been crashed through by someone on your contacts list. New races suggested for you through the Easy Drive menu are the ones your mates have just scored in. It’s pretty much impossible to play Most Wanted without competing against your friends.

“The company’s values are based around fun, accessible, social, connected games,” says Hamish Young, creative producer at Criterion. “A lot of people think that socials games are something you find on Facebook, and are about spamming your wall or whatever. We feel we make some of the most genuinely social games in the industry and we work really hard to make it very friend-centric, make it fun to play, make it very accessible. We have a bit of competition in there, but we push hard to make that competition more fun and friendly.”

Criterion has experience with this sort of thing, of course. Two years ago it crafted Auto-Log for its first Need For Speed game: Hot Pursuit. It allowed you to compare your race times with those of your friends. And it was born out of something that arose naturally in the office. “We were playing other games, and so like Top Gear, we’d write it up on a board – top race times,” says Craig Sullivan, Criterion’s creative director. “We were doing that in the office and we just thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if the game automatically did this?’”

But it isn’t just about comparing you against the best in the world, and making the average gamer feel insecure – it’s about comparing you against your friends. That way, it means more. “Everybody likes to win at something or be compared to their friends at something," says Sullivan. "I would much rather be compared to people around this table at how fast we can run the 100 metres than Usain Bolt.” Ultimately, beating a friend is so much sweeter, and attainable, and opportunities to do just that are scattered throughout Most Wanted.

Criterion is attempting to harness the power of your contacts list on Xbox Live and PSN like no other game. “The social networks on gaming machines have existed for six or seven years, even longer, and they’re essentially social networks but fairly mature ones when compared with LinkedIn and Facebook.” And Young says, “There’s missed a opportunity there, and we really want to push that as hard as we can.”So many aspects to the game that are measured and compared, yet it’s never intrusive nor repetitive. Playing Most Wanted against friends and entering into these challenges can’t get in the way of the game because it is the game. You crash through high scores before you even know that you’ve entered into a challenge. Even when you’re playing by yourself, the times to beat hovering above speed cameras and obstacles in the city remind you that you’re in a multiplayer game.‘Social gaming’ may strike terror into the hearts of those who know only too well the dreaded Mum-needs-more- hay-bale-for-her-barn-raising notification for Farmville. But Most Wanted is careful to bring multiplayer-enhancing social features to the table, rather than those annoying ones. Interestingly for such a networked game – especially when other EA IPs, such as The Sims have launched Facebook-only social games – Most Wanted has foregone any sort of Facebook integration. “Strangely, it’s less social to try and do that,”says Young. “The fact is that people who play the game care about the game and therefore the game is telling them what is going on, so when you boot up the game it gives you an update of what’s happened. So I think that’s better than trying to use another social network for that purpose or spamming a Facebook wall because that’s not really social; it feels very impersonal. Some games have tried to do it, and I don’t think any have successfully, especially in the console space.”

Sullivan obviously feels more passionately about it: “It drives me mad when I’m on Facebook and I’m constantly being invited to games that I don’t want to play anyway. And even if I did want to play them, when I’m on Facebook, I’m doing something else. It’s like you’re having breakfast in the morning and someone runs up to you and says, 'Argh! Look, I’m eating steak now! Do you want some steak!?' and it’s like, 'I’m happy with my cornflakes. Tell me about the steaks later.' So there’s a time and a place for everything. If you’re playing a game, then you’re playing a game; guess what you’re interested in doing at that point? Playing the game and competing with friends. So yes, we could spam people, but we don’t think that’s the way forward."

That sensitivity to what players want from a game extends to another aspect of contemporary games that has irritated the hardcore in recent years: motion controls. Like its approach to social connectivity, Criterion is using Microsoft’s Kinect to enhance the Most Wanted experience, not undermine it. Refreshingly, it doesn’t see you using motion control, arms outstretched, steering an invisible car – but rather, only uses the voice recognition capabilities of the hardware. It’s by no means an earth-shattering revelation, but it is a subtle, smart use of Kinect, and though its only real purpose is to navigate through menus via speech whilst still playing the game, it does work to make modification-on-the-move far more easy (a fiddly task to do simultaneously when using the regular controller alone).

And it’s that intelligent approach to making games, knowing what its audience wants, that has seen Criterion appointed as the custodian of the Need For Speed franchise. So what does the future hold for the series in the hands of one of the best racing game developers in the world? Unsurprisingly, Young and Sullivan wouldn’t be drawn. However, Sullivan tantalisingly speculated about the freedom the brand gives. “Need For Speed can cover lots of different things,” he says. “We always look to make a game fun first regardless of what it’s about. NFS, I think. is a big enough umbrella you can do anything with it. I think it’s got an exciting future ahead of it; we said we were only just getting started with Hot Pursuit and we generally meant that. We’re bringing new things and pushing the boundaries like having all the cars available at the start. There are things that we want to do at Criterion that haven’t been done before for NFS, and gaming in general, that we’re really excited to explore in the future so… let’s see what’s around the corner.”

However come November not sure what to choose...this or assassins creed.

I personally went with this game, here is why...

I do not have time like I once did to game. I know there are also other games coming out between now and Christmas that I want to play, so I see this as being the better game to pick up and play anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours, which is what my normal gaming sessions wind up being length wise these days. With the AC series, I find one needs a good couple of hours to make the session worthwhile and to really get into the game. That series is just not conducive to shorter game sessions, or to playing other games while playing it. Short sessions and playing other games really tends to break up the flow of AC games, at least for myself. So I plan on picking up AC in early 2013, when there is that lull of no real games being released.

So yeah, I actually just pre-ordered this on Amazon last night. And even though I am not sure if I will use it or a controller, I even went ahead and cleaned up my Logitech GT Racing Wheel for my PS3 (it had collected a little bit of dust being in my basement) and set it up on my crazy little night stand- racing wheel cockpit I made for myself. It works though, and almost is like having an arcade racing cabinet. So is a whole lot of fun to use.

games.on.net: There’s a growing gap in performance between the PC and consoles as consoles get older. Does that create more work for you guys, because you need to spend more time on the PC version?

Leanne Loombe: Yeah, we have a dedicated pipeline for the PC version. The way that we have it set up means we can dedicate more time to PC. The PC version of Most Wanted is obviously 1080p, 60Hz, and we’re using DirectX 11 as well. That’s there for the PC gamers.

games.on.net: Do you know which features of DX11 you’ll be using?

Leanne Loombe: We’re primarily leveraging the increased efficiency of DX11 to give improved performance. The move to DX11 from DX9 has given us around a 300% improvement in rendering performance. This has enabled us to provide an improved image based lighting model over the console version, as well as allowing us to run with higher detail shadows and reflections. The increased power of DirectX 11 hardware has also allowed us to implement features such as real-time ambient occlusion, and light scattering algorithms which are absent in the console version.

games.on.net: What other changes have you made to the visuals in the PC version?

I doubt EA has any more DX9 games in them, though I wasn't expecting Mass Effect 3 to be so we'll see.

And unless you have a really old GPU and Windows Vista/XP, you mostly won't care about less-than-DX11 support.

1. DX11 was standard fare in Windows 7 - Windows 8 ups the ante with DX 11.1.2. Intel HD2000 (integrated GPU in Sandy Bridge non-K CPUs) supports DX11 - so much for portable PCs having issues.3. Upgrading to DX11 (unless you have only AGP or PCI upgrade options) has gotten cheap - AMD HD7750 (1GB GDDR5 is standard, and does NOT require power beyond that supplies over the PCIe bus) is $110 at MicroCenter - even retail.(http://www.microcent...-:-Micro-Center)

As much as it is enticing to get the game for the PC with all of the extra eye candy, and my Logitech Wheel is USB so it would work, to me there is something about playing a racing game on the consoles that makes it feel at home to me, and it is the one genre I can pretty much without a doubt say I prefer playing it on a console.